ABSTRACT

The Nage people of Flores Island, eastern Indonesia, employ 76 names for locally recognized categories of birds. Of these, at least one third have cognates in other Central-Malayo-Polynesian languages, and among the latter as many as ten are further related to bird terms in other Malayo-Polynesian groupings. A major objective of this chapter is to consider the kinds of ornithological species that tend to be named in the same, or related, ways in languages belonging to different language groups – that is, the avifaunal referents of bird names which appear not to change, or to undergo little change, through time. Particular attention is paid to the possible role of onomatopoeia as a factor accounting for similarity of names and the constancy with which certain terms are retained as names for the same bird categories. Attention is also given to the influence of symbolic similarity on nomenclatural relatedness.